Wednesday, November 6, 2013

For enterprises, Windows 8.1 delivers the control around the Start Screen
that should have been there in Windows 8.0, there’s still no programmatic way to
pin or unpin shortcuts from the Start Screen.

Windows 8.1 introduces a
Group Policy method for distributing a Start Screen layout, but that’s a policy
– i.e. it’s enforced that approach only makes
sense in specific cases (e.g. schools, kiosks etc.). Note that Start Screen
control is only available in Windows 8.1 Enterprise and Windows RT
8.1

Microsoft have an article available on TechNet that describes a
number of ways that you can configure the default Start Screen experience that
will work for Windows 8/8.1, Window Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2, but
the choices are:
1.Create a reference image and use the CopyProfile setting
in unattend.xml to customise the default profile including the Start
Screen
2.Use the StartTiles setting in unattend.xml to specify a list of
tiles to add to the Start Screen
3.Use SysPrep to generate
AppsFolderLayout.bin and then copy that to the default profile

I suggest
you use the Powershell cmdlets that provides a way of getting your custom Start
Screen layout into the default profile. These works for all edition of Windows
8.1.

This approach is really about customising the default Start Screen
experience (i.e. first logon). If you want control of the Start Screen (users
receive the same screen every session) you will need Windows 8.1 Enterprise or
Windows Server 2012 R2. You can use this method to customise a reference image,
an unattended deployment.

High level overview:
1.Deploy and/or log
onto a machine that has the applications that you want to pin to the Start
Screen
2.Customise that Start Screen to your heart’s content
3.Export
the Start Screen configuration with Export-StartLayout
4.Import the Start
Screen configuration with Import-StartLayout

The documentation for Import-StartLayout indicates that this cmdlet only
works against offline images (mounted with ImageX); however the cmdlet can be
run against the current Windows installation which is ideal for MDT task
sequence deployment. The following command will import the customisation into
the default profile of the local system. This will need to be run from an
elevated command prompt.